“Get used to it” Senate projections, Autumn 2018

The Australia Institute routinely polls a representative sample of the Australian population on a variety of issues, including how they intend to vote at the next election. While other pollsters only ask about House of Representatives voting intention, our polling also asks specifically about Senate voting intention.

In this new report series, to be released quarterly, we will present and analyse the results of these Senate voting intention polls to project the potential makeup of the Senate following one or more elections.

The first edition of Senate Projections finds that, on current polling, future elections are likely to return a crossbench that is about as large and divided as the current one. A future Coalition government would have to cooperate with the Greens or multiple non-Green crossbench parties and independents and a future Labor government would have to cooperate with the Greens and multiple non-Green crossbench parties and independents.